A ground-breaking point-of-care device being developed by Lumos Diagnostics to diagnose threats faced by deployed forces has won the Innovation Award for Combat Equipment and Mobility at the international Land Forces 2018 expo in Adelaide, Australia.

Lumos, a Planet Innovation company, is working on the device in collaboration with the Defence Materials Technology Centre (DMTC) as part of a Medical Countermeasures (MCM) program. The program’s aim is to develop Australia’s capability to protect military personnel and civilians against chemical, biological and radiological threats, emerging infectious diseases and pandemics.

The winning device is a handheld, multiplexed diagnostic solution that will allow the military to test people for multiple defence-relevant infectious diseases in remote locations, using only one sample and test cartridge.

It will be able to make a diagnosis in just 10 to 15 minutes, meaning appropriate responses and treatments can be rapidly determined at the point-of-care. The device can then wirelessly relay this information to a central command post, allowing real-time tracking of disease outbreaks.

Dr Sacha Dopheide, CEO of Lumos Diagnostics, said the device would not only grow Australia’s capacity to deal with threats posed by infectious diseases, but also had applications for human health worldwide.

“This novel technology platform provides the ability to deliver the high sensitivity and accuracy needed to be able to concurrently test for multiple different infectious diseases at point-of-care,” Sacha said.

“It was designed to enable the military to rapidly detect infectious disease agents in the field, but has much broader potential as the same diseases can be found in the civilian population.”

The MCM project – which also involves Anteo Technologies and Deakin University – has so far delivered a fully integrated diagnostic system with improved sensitivity, specificity and performance costs over current solutions. These advances have been achieved through modifications to Lumos’s camera-based reader platform, a new thread-based assay membrane and improved assay chemistries.

The technology will be further developed in the next phase of the project, which has been approved and is expected to commence shortly.